Category Archives: Universities

What are you looking at when you look at a computer that is not switched on? It is the world, black and promising, but what if that world were never switched off? Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the first browser in 1990. It was called WorldWideWeb. Berners Lee wrote the code for what was […]

The current state of universities is intriguing. For the first time in around fifteen years a purely intellectual education for everyone is being aggressively questioned. Or at least it is in the UK. France and Germany are increasing state funding for young people to learn at the highest level and although there are difficulties, the […]

Changing landscapes The British Library operates many services that support the Higher Education sector. It now works in a financial climate that is likely to alter fundamentally within the next three to five years as teaching funding for the arts and humanities begins to affect students’ decisions to progress with postgraduate degrees. The student population […]

The future university is often termed in the singular. Similarly, the future of libraries assumes a common destiny, as if all libraries, all universities were the same to begin with. This of course, is not the case. Each one is a different piece in the jigsaw that forms the education sector. Universities in the future […]

It is difficult to see the truth when it hides behind well-groomed intelligence. David Willetts, the UK’s minister for universities is the considerate, clever face of a government which either does know what it is doing, and if so should be honest about it, or doesn’t know what it is doing, and if so should […]

‘Oh that Tony Blair. He’d stick a poem on a bus shelter and call it a University.’ Victoria Wood I think I’ve heard just about enough of government cuts. The entire topic is misrepresented by both Parliament and Whitehall, and oddly accepted by the press. It is clearly an opportunistic attempt to re-engineer much of […]

I wanted to post a copy of an interview I did with the Times Higher Education Supplement last week on the blog. The text is by Paul Jump at the THES and it raises some interesting angles on the future of institutional repositories, the international infrastructure in place for the deposit of open access articles […]

I am finishing work on a piece for a national publication at the moment on whether it is possible, or indeed even wise to start a journal in the humanities that has a similar market profile as ‘Nature,’ the critical and popular science journal. There are many other developments in humanities scholarly practice beyond the […]

Senate House Library, University of London Librarians who began practising in the last ten years have had the phrases, ‘the death of the book,’ and ‘the end of libraries’ ringing in our ears for much of our careers. Yet, relegate a book to the store and you invite […]

I have been working on an idea concerning the sociology of libraries over the last few weeks. John B. Thompson, Professor of Sociology at Cambridge University, published a book recently, called Merchants of Culture. It is the most important modern work on the publishing industry and follows his equally essential Books in the Digital Age. […]